Inescapable, p.2
Inescapable, page 2
Aimee had known returning to the cabin would make these episodes sharper. She just hadn’t expected George to look so alive. If she looked—really looked—she could see through him. She knew she shouldn’t allow herself to imagine him like this, but she couldn’t seem to stop it. She drew in details like they were water and she was dying of thirst: the fan of wrinkles at the corner of laughing eyes; the shirt splotched with paint; the long, painter’s hands; fingernails stained with pigment and nicotine. The ache in her chest blossomed into a pain so sharp she couldn’t breathe and she rolled onto her side, breathing in shaking gulps.
“I said g’morning, sunshine.”
“Morning yourself,” she muttered as she untangled herself from the covers and escaped to the ensuite bathroom. She glanced back at the bed. Stark, crisp sheets marked his side of the bed. Seeing it, her chest released. She wasn’t certain why it mattered, but it did.
“Glad you’re finally up,” George said. “It’s beautiful out today. Sky’s full of clouds. Mount Rundle’s gorgeous.”
Aimee slammed the bathroom door and leaned against it. She didn’t want to deal with her turbulent memories. Not yet. It was still too painful.
“I want to get out early today so I can catch the play of light over the mountains,” he continued through the partition. “It won’t last.”
Aimee walked shakily to the sink, catching herself against the icy porcelain. She counted to ten, then twenty, then thirty, the way she’d done as a child to force dark thoughts away. On the other side of the door she could hear George humming—I can imagine him humming, her mind corrected—the way George had always done when working on a big project. The remembered sound was enough to bring her to tears. Aimee struggled with the faucet, splashing freezing water over her face and neck. The sound of humming faded as she became alert. Calmer, she moved through her morning toilette with numbed repetition. Toilet. Sink. Shower. Her body in the present, mind trapped in the past.
By the time she emerged from the bathroom, the last dregs of the dream had been scoured away with a bitter lather of obligations. The real estate agent would be coming by in less than an hour. The cabin was to be sold, the money divided between the will’s many recipients. Another stab of pain. This had been their place—hers and George’s escape—but her husband’s will had been seeded with land mines. Aimee’s heart twisted. She needed to pull herself together, play it calm. Do what needed to be done. This was her life now—hers alone—and every decision mattered.
She put her hand on the doorknob and took a slow breath.
“It’s not real,” Aimee whispered. “George is dead and gone.” She repeated more firmly. “Gone.”
Aimee pushed the door wide.
The room was bare, just as she’d known it would be. Murky light filtered through half-parted curtains, rain running down the windows like tears. The unmade side of the bed sat untouched. George’s ghost, so painful, so reassuring, had disappeared. One part of her was relieved, the other grief-stricken.
Truth was, she missed him.
—
It was a relief to leave Banff behind.
The movers would take out the furniture and pack up the household items this week; next weekend she’d return to divvy up George’s personal items. After six months of lawyers, she was grateful to be at this point: sell it all, send it away, let the law firm deal with the rest.
“I’ll have the cabin sold in a month,” David Arturo, the real estate agent said. “You rest assured.”
Aimee didn’t share his excitement, nor certainty, but she nodded all the same. “Good,” she said as she handed him the key. “I just want it done.”
A bitter smile tightened the edges of her mouth as she imagined the boxes sitting on the wide front stoop of Jacqueline’s sprawling New York estate, cluttering the snow white living room that had graced the cover of more than one decorating magazine. She’s the one who contested the will, Aimee thought. Let her sort out her father’s mess. Aimee no longer cared.
“Oh, you’ll do better than just sold,” he said, giving her an oily smile. “This place is prime. It’ll get a tidy profit.”
Aimee shrugged. “Keep me updated.”
“I’ll call you as soon as I get an offer,” he said, tossing the keys into the air and catching them. “Safe travels back to cow-town.”
“Thanks.”
Aimee stepped off the porch. Away from the awning, the rain was a sheet, soaking her. She turned up the collar of her jacket as she trudged through the mud to her car.
“Aimee...”
The sound of her name was a whisper, but a shiver ran up her spine. She glanced sideways. David was already inside his black sports car, cell phone in hand. It sounded like George, she thought, but shoved the idea away just as fast. She picked up her pace, steps slapping in puddles. The back of her scalp prickled, but she stared steadfastly forward. I won’t check, she thought grimly. There’s no one there.
She climbed into her car, and started the engine, waiting while the windows unfogged.
“Aimee!”
She jumped at the sound of her name, everywhere and nowhere at once.
“Fuck this,” she hissed, popping the car into drive and tearing away from the empty house and down the waterlogged street. Fans of water sprayed out on either side, tires hissing angrily.
Coming to Banff had been a terrible idea.
—
Back in Calgary, the depression Aimee had been fighting for months resurged. Like the low clouds which wrapped the city, her despair darkened everything in her gaze. She couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t eat. Only work kept her sane.
Why did you have to die, George?
Days passed. Grey skies became the norm, the patter of rain became the static sound of her life, no longer noticeable. It had always been raining, hadn’t it? She climbed out of bed, and followed her routine like a sleepwalker, stumbling the five blocks from her downtown condo to the Glenbow Museum. Hiding in her office. Doing it all again.
God, I miss you so much.
On a Wednesday, Aimee arrived just after six a.m. Sidestepping the cleaning crew, she headed to the staff room. She peered around the small space, relieved to see that her intern hadn’t arrived. Knowing Niha, the Glenbow’s receptionist/assistant/jack-of-all-trades, there’d be questions—ones Aimee didn’t want to answer—but the room was blessedly empty, and the tightness across Aimee’s shoulders eased. After eight years as a restorer at the Glenbow, Aimee’s workload had grown enough that she needed someone to assist with the paperwork side of her job. She just wasn’t prepared for Niha’s joyful exuberance at this time of morning.
Aimee hung her dripping coat in her locker, and pulled on the white smock she wore for restorations. She counted the buttons as she did them up—another pattern, another routine—then stepped in front of the wall mirror to inspect the face which greeted her. Blue shadows ringed both eyes. Her cheekbones were angrily sharp, hollows under them. Her freckled skin had grown so pale it was translucent. Aimee frowned and the girl in the mirror did too. “I’ve aged a decade since you died,” she muttered. With a sigh, the reflection ran her fingers through her hair, twisting the curls into a loose bun at the nape of her neck and sliding on a hairnet. Aimee followed the mirror’s lead.
“You’re in early again.”
She squeaked in surprise, turning to discover Steve, the night security guard, waiting in the doorway.
“Yeah, I guess I am,” she said with a nod, hoping he’d leave it at that.
“You got a big deadline or something?”
“Not really.”
Steve leaned against the door frame and crossed his arms, watching. “Then why all the early mornings?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said evenly. There was another answer, one she couldn’t give. It was easier when she came in early, and left late. No knowing looks or well-meaning hugs she didn’t want. Nothing like this.
“I always work these hours,” Aimee added.
Steve’s expression faltered. “Really? I figured you must be working on something important. Seems like you’re always here.”
She forced a bright smile. “Oh, they’re all important,” Aimee said. “But no. Nothing rushed.”
He nodded, but still didn’t leave. Seconds passed.
“Then why?” he asked.
Aimee’s smile was rigid, hands clenched. “I just work better alone,” she said. “I like the quiet. It lets me focus. Lets my mind drift.”
“I don’t know about you, but I find the basement creepy as hell.” He chuckled nervously.
Aimee shrugged, turning her back to him to look at the mirror instead. Perhaps then he’d take the hint. She smoothed an unruly curl back under the hairnet. Her reflection did too. In the last months, her long hair had lost its lustre. It hung limp and brittle around her pale face.
“I swear I hear footsteps sometimes at night,” Steve said. “You don’t get lonely down there?”
“Not so much,” she said, straightening the hairnet. “And I like the quiet downstairs. Besides, being alone lets me—” She stumbled, realizing she’d almost said forget. “—get stuff done without interruptions,” she quickly added. “And I should get going, actually.”
Steve grinned, stepping out of the doorway. “Well, don’t let me stop you,” he said with a wave. “Was good talking with you, Aimee. Always nice to see you around.”
“Yeah, you too.”
“Let me know if you need anything.”
“Thanks, Steve. I will.”
She kept the smile on her face until he strode down the corridor. The expression felt odd on her mouth, like the clothes she wore that no longer fit. The grimace fell from her lips the moment he disappeared around the corner. Aimee swallowed against the lump in her throat and headed for the stairs.
Pretending drained her.
—
The archives and restorations wing was located in the bowels of the Glenbow. Aimee rushed down the service stairwell, hoping to avoid anyone else.
I just want to be left alone.
Reaching her office, she took a slow breath: the faint vapour of paint and solvent warmed the recycled air, the hidden musk of pigments—stored in a grid of tiny jars—a subtler perfume hidden beneath it. To the untrained eye, the room, with its stark white walls, stainless steel sinks, empty tables and bright lights, appeared antiseptically bare. Even the line of brushes, arranged by hair type, medium, and width, seemed to be more appropriate for a medical display than an artist’s studio. But Aimee knew from experience that the barren aesthetic allowed her to dissolve herself into the painting she was repairing. The room was a blank piece of paper, on which she could redraw whatever lines that time (or damage) had erased from the artwork she restored.
A place she was free to dream.
The restorations room was as different from Aimee’s one-time studio had been that—if she wasn’t the same person who’d inhabited both—she wouldn’t have believed it possible. A narrow line appeared between her brows as her long ago studio floated forward from memory. It had been on the third floor of an aging Stephen Avenue building, the high-ceilinged room cluttered with pigment and canvas, its walls hung with scraps of paper and pinned photographs, all of it inspiration for the bold, multi-layered canvases that filled the space. She sighed. These days, the thought of that sort of chaos exhausted her, but a decade earlier, it had been her lifeblood. She’d thrived in that vividness, finding beauty and focus in its disarray. And then George had fallen into her life and every colour in the world had faded besides him. The old pain returned with a jolt.
Why did you have to leave me, George?
Hands shaking, she pressed down her apron, smoothing non-existent wrinkles. These days, the quiet of white on white, the bare walls, the paint whose colours she matched rather than selected fit her better. There was no choosing here. No anything. She could channel the genius of someone else while she, herself, could be nothing at all.
Of the numerous paintings she’d restored over her ten year career, the one she would work on today provided a unique challenge. It was a small study for Delacroix’s famous Raft of the Medusa. The newly-acquired work of art had required cleaning prior to the cracks being repaired, and Aimee and two assistants had spent three weeks and endless cotton swabs dabbing away two centuries of murkiness from the painting’s surface. The newly freshened pigment had revealed an unexpected issue. Sometime in the last century, another repair had been attempted. Whatever restorer had undertaken the task hadn’t thought to first remove the earlier decades of grime, and the additional brush strokes stood out in glaring contrast to the remainder of the image. These strokes were two shades darker than they should be, and painted with a novice’s sloppy hand. With utmost care, Aimee had slowly undone the previous-restorer’s gaffe, peeling off layers of damage with a solvent-soaked fine-tip until only Delacroix’s original, and the jarring damage, remained.
Aimee pulled off the drop cloth, the first hint of a smile returning to her lips. This morning she’d begin the restoration.
She laid out a work area on one of the room’s many wooden easels, clamping the painting into position before selecting her paints and organizing them based on colour and hue. Each of the raw pigments had been ground with mortar and pestle, based on centuries-old recipes. Everything—from the lapis lazuli in the blue to the original rabbit-skin glue mixed with chalk in the gesso—was as original as she could recreate. No detail too small. As many hours went into the preparation of pigments as the actual process of repair. Sliding her chair up to the easel, Aimee mixed a small dab of colour on the surface, brackish blue tinged with grey, and dabbed it on a test board. There were lines of dried colour tabs along the side of her test canvas, but she still double checked, tilting it one way and the next in position near the original, adjusting the lamp to catch the light.
“Perfect.”
She swirled the brush again, lifting a minute amount to the surface with trembling hands. She breathed out and her fingers stilled. She touched the brush to the surface.
The world fell away.
Nearly an hour later, Aimee had inpainted an area the size of a postage stamp. A small step forward, though the heaviest damage, where the cracks went right down to the board, had been painstakingly recovered. With the under-painting reemerging, the work quickened and her mind began to drift. She could imagine Eugène as a young artist living alone in his hovel in Paris, the way she’d read about in his journals. She’d studied his diaries when she was taking art history in university. Aimee smirked as remembered details rose in her mind: Eugène, dark haired and brooding, his sensual mouth downturned in disdain, an image she recognized from his earliest self-portraits. Mind wandering, hands busy, it was easy to imagine the artist standing here. As a child, magical flights of imagination had been her whole life, but nowadays that feeling was hard to rekindle. Today she longed for the escape.
A flicker appeared in the corner of her eye.
Eugène would be wearing an old dressing gown, Aimee decided, paint-flecked and dirty, a stained linen shirt underneath. She smiled to herself, leaning in to place another dab of paint on the canvas. The warm smell of linseed oil and turpentine rose like incense. If Eugène had been here, Aimee thought, there’d be the other odours too: unwashed male and wine, the heady scent of Parisian cologne. Most likely Eugène would be scowling at the painting, unhappy with his work. Poor Eugène, Aimee thought, so dark, so dismal. In the corner of the room, the shadow coalesced under the prompting of her thoughts. She added a flicker of light with a twist of her wrist, moving her hand sideways as she dove back into the painting.
Eugène had been young when he’d written his first journal, searching for a way to fit his avant-garde style into the classical system of the times. In Aimee’s mind, the vision grew solid, stretching one muscled arm, then the other, as he walked nearer. A line from the young painter’s journal came to mind: “All my days lead to the same conclusion; an infinite longing for something which I can never have, a void which I cannot fill.” Aimee understood that sentiment better now than she had in her twenties. Eugène Delacroix was more than an artist, he was a revolutionary. He wanted to change the world through his art.
“That stroke is all wrong,” the ghost announced.
Aimee peeked up to find a twenty-something Eugène—eyes wild and black hair tangled—watching her in distrust. Like his self-portraits, he was unexpectedly attractive. His skin had a Spaniard’s tanned warmth; his thick hair shone the colour of jet. Aimee recognized the expression from an etching she’d once seen of him: young and angry. She turned back to the painting, inspecting the raised smear of paint.
“Go away, Eugène,” she said. “I know what I’m doing.” She lifted the paintbrush, about to continue.
“You don’t,” he interrupted, breaking her concentration. “It’s wrong.”
She lowered the brush, tipping her head to the side. “You think?”
Eugène made a sound of disgust. “Yes, I do! I wouldn’t say as much if I didn’t.”
Aimee bit back a smile. She loved these flights of fancy, imagining people long-dead. The ghost stepped closer. She knew if she looked, he’d be almost fully solid, but she stared at his painting instead. There was something wrong with the patch she’d finished, and she couldn’t figure out what.
Eugène’s ghost made an angry sound in the back of his throat.
“Go on then,” she said. “I’m listening.”
“It’s the wrong angle,” Eugène said tartly. “These strokes? Here and here; they don’t match.” He gestured at the marks that filled the surface. “See that bit of black? And this swirl of ochre?” His finger, semi-transparent and trembling, hovered just above the original lines that appeared on either side of the crack. “I was rushing when I painted this. The light was gone in my studio, and I’d run out of candles. Money, you see, was always short.” He sniffed as if the thought was below him. “I took the canvas to the window, and set it on the table, catching the last of the daylight. This wasn’t painted at an easel.”
